Speaker: Tom Dietterich

TaskTracer: Toward a Task-Oriented Desktop
Interface

Abstract

Knowledge workers are multi-taskers.Their work lives can be divided into multiple
on-going projects or activities, and their time at the desktop interleaves work
on these projects and activities.However, existing desktop user interfaces do not have any notion of
coherent projects or activities.The TaskTracer system seeks to support these
workers by organizing the files, folders, contact information, calendar
appointments, and web sites (collectively known as "resources")
according to the activities that they support.To use TaskTracer,
the user defines a hierarchy of projects/activities and declares to TaskTracer what current task he/she is working on at each
point in time.TaskTracer
instruments Microsoft Windows and standard office applications to gather data
on the resources that are accessed by the user and associates them with the
currently-declared task.It then
provides project-related assistance through (a) the TaskExplorer
(which makes it easy for the user to return to previously-accessed resources),
(b) the FolderPredictor (which predicts the relevant
folder for Open and SaveAs actions), and TaskNotes (which provides a task-related notebook).To reduce the need for the user to
declare the current activity, we apply machine learning methods to predict the
current activity of the user based on incoming email messages and desktop
behavior.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Dietterich (AB Oberlin College 1977; MS University of
Illinois 1979; PhD Stanford University 1984) is Professor and Director of
Intelligent Systems in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at OregonStateUniversity, where he
joined the faculty in 1985.In
1987, he was named a Presidential Young Investigator for the NSF.In 1990, he published, with Dr. Jude
Shavlik, the book entitled Readings in Machine Learning, and he also served as
the Technical Program Co-Chair of the National Conference on Artificial
Intelligence (AAAI-90).From
1992-1998 he held the position of Executive Editor of the journal Machine
Learning.The American Association
for Artificial Intelligence named him a Fellow in 1994, and the Association for
Computing Machinery did the same in 2003.In 2000, he co-founded a new, free electronic journal: The
Journal of Machine Learning Research.He served as Technical Program Chair of the Neural Information
Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in 2000 and General Chair in 2001.He is currently President of the
International Machine Learning Society, a member of the DARPA Information
Science and Technology Study Group, and he also serves on the Board of Trustees
of the NIPS Foundation.